How to write a modern romance novel? In a summer house on the lake Jenny Erpenbeck reads the traces of a turbulent century of German history. A masterful novel about people and their search for a home.
Home novel, it doesn’t sound to “Good books”, but trivial in literature. According to stories, the return of the depraved cities in the back, to the life of a supposedly intact and manageable world. However, intact and manageable and there is nothing in the world, of Jenny Erpenbeck traces in her novel “the visitation”. From the perspective of residents, staff and visitors, they reconstructed the history of a summer house on a Brandenburg lake, an hour Southeast of Berlin. One house, three families, five generations, just over two hundred pages, the novel condenses the madness of a German century, from the Weimar Republic to the post cold war years.
As the architect from Berlin who builds his young wife, the thatched house on the lake. The Jewish neighbor who fled from the Nazis and his property for a ridiculously low price to the architects sold. War, Collapse. A writer moves in. You return from the Russian exile to help build the GDR, firmly Believing in the utopia of a socialist Germany.
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“Visitation” by Jenny Erpenbeck
“I-c-h-e-h-r-e h-e-i-m. no, she and her husband are not returned to Germany’s home, but they wanted this country, and it was only by chance, whose language they spoke, home, get in your thoughts. No longer wanted to pull out of the German wreckage finally some ground under the feet, the would be deceptive.”
The inhabitants of the Seahouse appear and disappear, like the great ideologies of the time. The only constant in this world is the gardener. He is just there. Does exactly what I need to do a gardener, mute and, of course, as the nature. At the end of the demolition (disposal according to valid rules on Emissions), then “is similar to the landscape for a brief Moment, back to self”. A new cycle can begin in this millennia-old landscape, forest and water.
“Visitation” is a novel about the search for a home and for your loss. And on the steady-state force of nature. A cleverly constructed historical deep drilling, written in a straightforward, almost scientific-and-sober language to law as century, the novel is celebrated.
The theatre, according to Jenny Erpenbecks “visitation” was premiered in 2010 in Gera
The views of the past and the Disappearance characterizes the work of Jenny Erpenbeck , whether it is the long shadow of Childhood (“The old child”, “dictionary”) or a tribute to the farewell (“things that disappear”). In their 2015 published novel, “Go, went, gone” to the writer the current Drama of the refugees.
Jenny Erpenbeck: “visitation” (2008), available at Penguin books
Jenny Erpenbeck, born in 1967 in East Berlin, is a trained bookbinder and theatre Director. She made her debut in 1999 with the novel “story of the old child”. For her work she has received many awards (including the Joseph breitbach prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Thomas Mann prize). Her books are translated into about 20 languages.